The Eric Rohmer films
Rohmer, who has been explore with freshness, tenderness and consistency in the characters and landscapes of France, has always been offset with respect to the modes of his time. Ranked as director of the New Wave, his research thematic and formal personal place it in a certain literary tradition and aesthetic very French, in which the accuracy of the dialogues and the sophistication of a large plot combines naturalism places and classicism the staging. In Rohmer's world, the word itself to a set of false pretenses, double discourse, in which the banter turns to philosophy and misunderstandings so dear to vaudeville combine with an existential quest. Love, luck, the lives of everyone, full of byways, hesitations, sometimes waiting sometimes fiery resignation of a love lived or desired, the possibilities are almost endless as the encounters between the characters and the filmmaker deploys as many theorems as both relentlessly thorough in their buildings and wonderfully open to chance.
These are the themes of his films, and many others, making a filmmaker very endearing and close to the life. It also has a very large dose of humor and tender irony that he observes his characters with distance and reveals their intimate stratagems without the trap. In his films, you can hear a teacher talk about philosophy transcendental metaphysics, an engineer Catholic expose his ideas about Pascal's wager applied to love, with a small station but without pedantry. He also captured the genius with variegated light reflections on the faces, he has chosen to film with sensuality and opulence of the colors of autumn in the countryside.
The order of discourse and the world order
The films of Eric Rohmer is the encounter between the order of discourse and the world order. The order of discourse, these are the dialogues in which the characters dig tirelessly cleft between what they profess their feelings, their words and their actions, their profession of faith of their actions concrete, their internal debates and the constructed image, sound, mastered they want to give of themselves. The world order is the physical presence of things, the passing seasons and which Rohmer is the physical center of his films, these are the beaches covered by logorrhea characters, both bundled up in the ongoing analysis that 'they do their internal condition and fully enrolled in the moment they cross. It is these fleeting moments, these cities are also captured in their most authentic, they explored parts of France, registered in the continuity of a philosophical tradition (one thinks of Pascal, of course, but also the heather in his studies of character; La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine, etc.), literary (Musset, Marivaux) or pictorial. This meeting between morality and physical makes it so tasty Rohmer's films, because they register a philosophical dialogue, moral dilemmas in extremely sophisticated landscapes both familiar and unique, moving from being the innocent part, static and Yet these vibrant theoretical reasonings of the intimate.
The relationship between moral philosophy and the films of Rohmer is obvious at first. From My Night at Mode , Christian philosophy is here to prepare the debate, the character to secure a reflection on existence, laid the theoretical foundations of an internal debate. In My Night at Mode , the reference to Pascal is pervasive not only in dialogue but in the very theme of the film, a character who, having seen a woman for the first time in a mass, made the bet, like Pascal for God, it's the woman of his life despite the lack of certainty as to the possible implementation and future of his choice, a decision "sudden and obvious irremediable. " He thereby surrenders to another relationship more real, but short of the absolute faith in the destiny. Rohmer's modernity is that the choice of Pascal, that of a gamble on the unknown, is detached from the metaphysical realm to reach the secular world of human desires, encounters. Yet metaphysics is still there. For the filmmaker, who attempts to describe carefully and playfully intimate discussion of his characters, recorded a very concrete way a reflection on broader themes: the Coincidentally, the meaning of human choices, faith in the fulfillment of desires, loneliness. He has been exploring the field of couple relationships and give faces and words of intimate discussions that might seem trivial, the filmmaker observes with irony tender: the ambition of a woman seeking make a good marriage is misguided in its own contradictions and eventually scare the man on whom she has set her sights ( The beautiful wedding ) a young man who hesitates between three women and as such we take procrastination sentimental one beach to another of Britain ( Conte Summer ) of a young woman who firmly believes she will find the man of her life despite little chance of such a meeting ( Winter's Tale); etc.. And yet, although some dialogues or monologues instead of characters explaining their views are quite indicative of the existence of these domestic issues, there is no dramatization in the dilemma or choice, no will to psychologize or psychoanalyze his characters. His films are built more around the contradiction between theoretical assumptions and starting actions that reveal how reality will act as the laboratory experience, taking away the preconceptions of the characters. This is its moral discover under the surface of the meat speech to be vibrant, with all its contradictions, with its false pretenses and meanders of his mind. What he reveals quite the ambivalence of his characters in their relation to thought, the flesh and love.
Rohmer also combines the talents of a rhetorician and those of a philosopher naturalist. The rhetoric is omnipresent in his films, because the order of speeches that the characters build upon themselves and the world needs stylistic figures, which draw the creepage and paradoxes, which accentuate the trap of words better reveal the hollow, the meaning of actions. The literary dialogue is well accentuated by the control that the characters seem to have the language. But this control is only to lose them. Their ambivalence about themselves is obscured by misleading their mastery of words.
Naturalism is home not mystical or animist. in The Green Ray , Delphine, the main character is a lonely young woman who despairs of never being able to find a soul mate and whose loneliness is further exacerbated with the summer vacation during which she finds herself alone and without a fixed program. We follow in his wanderings bored and lonely on the Normandy coast of Cherbourg in the mountains, from Paris to Biarritz. In all these places, nature, landscapes are everywhere and yet it feels Delphine separated as by a veil of mystery which nimbus things. In this film, the Green Ray is a physical phenomenon described by Jules Verne in one of his novels, which is the last ray of sun on the horizon a fleeting moment before it disappeared into the sea is something rare, elusive and yet sublime, which must be entered before disappearing, just like the love Delphine research. In the final scene, having finally met a boy at the station and accompanying him in Saint Jean de Luz, Delphine and her new friend / companion attending finally united and vibrant, this miracle of rare green flash.
A certain peace and serenity emerge from this report qu'entretient Rohmer with natural areas and seasons he films. It is far from sudden conversions to the mystery of presence, it is far from moments of grace, revelations of the existence of violent beauty above, as in the films of Rossellini, another Christian filmmaker. Urban and natural spaces are filmed with neutrality, and even during those moments of grace as the green flash, no mysticism blurs the face-to-face meeting between the landscapes and faces.
principle and reality principle of ideality
The films of Eric Rohmer, though they seem rather mild bill, are not comedies of manners. They liken it certainly, but above the genus by the presence of a spiritual and existential makes deep and endearing characters. Indeed, most of his characters seem in search of an absolute, often it is an absolute love. They seek to comply with a romantic ideal, hence the many equivocations they show as if the principle of reality should be constantly pushed, fought, by the principle of the ideal. First they ask the terms of this research, they draw the perfect face speech or real man or woman to love. The reality is put to the test by encounters with beings that could have some satisfactory properties but do not necessarily represent all the qualities of the ideal. His characters are somewhat stubborn, as if they could not be satisfied with an in-between, as if they were crossed by a blind belief, irrational, and yet entirely plausible in the possibility of meeting with the ideal dream. The characters are also in search of purity. The green flash in , Delphine is often put to the test of reality by many meetings, which seem like so many pitfalls that can give up his ideals. Her friends crowded around to watch her, at various times of the men watching, interested in her, but she turns away because it is driven by a deep belief in the futility of these meetings. Only after a pilgrimage risky and painful fact that the meeting, which will finally enable him to live with her possible love, the miracle of rare green flash. Similarly, the character played by Jean-Louis Trintignant in My Night at Maud is inhabited by the image of the woman seen at Mass and who seems to embody his ideal love. His meeting with Maud, although fertile, deep, can replace this ideal, in which he projects on which he makes a foolish bet. In Winter's Tale , Felicia is also a bet on the meeting with Charles, the father of her child she had lost sight of it 5 years ago. But Rohmer treats this romantic ideal with some irony. In My Night at Maud's, the young blonde woman and pure as the Catholic Jean-Louis meeting at the midnight mass and become his wife is not as pure and virginal as her ethereal appearance suggests.
The issue of choice is often the center of Rohmer films, be it a voluntary choice or just a coincidence. Love is the ideal testing ground because the theme of this discourse of love captures the intimacy of the characters and deploy all the many possible combinations of their reports. There are two poles or two classes of characters in the films of Rohmer: the category of adamant that, despite the bad luck firmly believe in the existence of an ideal and its realization, the category of undecided who keep swinging between several choice, uncertain and tangent.
Send performative
The volubility Character is not simply gratuitous nor solipsistic. The speech reveals the characters themselves at the same time it tends to start changing their attitudes and their relationship to others and the world. The word does not only carry of the drive and record does not confine the characters in theorizing on love rather than his experience. The word is often translated into action and may even have a performative effect clearly outlined in the engagement of the romantic plot: in several movies, a character suggests to some other action, setting in motion a mechanical complex situations and will change the perceptions that had characters from reality. In "Claire's Knee", the writer suggests that Aurora Jerome idea that should appeal to the young Laura to serve as a model for his book about the passion of a mature man for a teenager. Jerome takes the game, especially since this dandy is getting married in a few days and it is his last chance to win. However, he was fascinated beyond the game with another young woman, Claire, whose knee becomes the attachment point of eroticism. Similarly, in "Summer Tale 'Margot suggests Gaspard, a young man looking ethereal and undefined, to go out with Soledad, for it exceeds its slump and permanent self-flagellation. Despite his denials and assertions in the conclusive fact that Soledad is not his style, when he meets by chance on the promontory of Dinard Gaspard away by Solene and begins to flirt with her. The words, the dialogues are important in Rohmer's films because they show a double reality: the perception that the characters themselves, their character and their relationships with others, and weed action than words and actions of others have on them. These characters in motion, tossed about by chance, erecting indecision principle of life, are very present in the films of Rohmer. The characters are described at a decisive moment when everything can happen, where the roads are still open and where parallel roads open to them: their successive choices to one or the other channel is carried by their travels in space, with their exploration of the places where part of their wandering, their indecision and perplexed by these coincidences that trouble them. Rohmer's intelligence is to be able to express emotional and wandering the fickleness of choice in a very concrete and naturalistic, with this documentary exploration of places and spaces that are part of registration of these very physical dialogues erratic and voluble.
has often talked of literary dialogue in the films of Rohmer. Yet his films are extremely worked a cinematic point of view, although fairly standard invoice. The research design is unobtrusive and almost transparent. It is often inspired by the visual world of painters such as Matisse Pauline at the Beach. In his films the word is used not only on activation and development of the action, but the very construction of the image. Claire's Knee is the film that best illustrates. This knee around which have turned so many speeches, which aroused concupiscence cold and a bit perverse that the interest distanced Gérôme and manipulator of Aurora, now it deploys the image in the scene hinge of the film, the splendor of his presence, pure geometric line to clear the frame and graceful design. Rohmer has captured the essence of cinema in which words are embodied by the images and become the precursors or catalysts pictures to come.
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